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Where's the beef?
12/09/2009

Pros: Tooless design, plenty of room for the most part, good ventillation, Looks good, quiet.

Cons: Front aluminum bezel/cover has a PLASTIC horizontal grill. That doesn't bug me much though. What really irritates me is the thin materials in the overall construction. The aluminum that makes up the top surface is only 1mm thick!!! That's ONE MILLIMETER..... 1mm=.40in. a

human hair is 3 to 5 thousandth's so assuming four thousandth's, the top panel is only is 10 human hairs thick!

I could put a hole through it with a screwdriver if I wanted to or if I accidentally dropped something on it it

would have a large dent. Plus when you tap it with your hand it makes alot of noise and reminds me of a cheap

drive. I'm lost, I don't get the reasoning or what they're thinking over at Lian Li but I wont ever waste money

on another one of their cases. This thing makes me want to tool up and start building my own custom cases.

Other Thoughts: Continued>> The mobo tray is also flimsy. You'd think this is the part that should be sturdy since it's gonna hold alot of weight but it's too thin. The cpu cutout is misaligned for the amd MSI GD70 to the point it's not usable,so mobo removal is required for backplate replecement. Now I have a flimsy MOBO tray with a big hole in it:) Also being so thin I think they should've placed imbedded steel insterts in the tray to prevent mobo standoff threads from stripping the thin aluminum since there's not much material to work with. Some reason they used imbedded steel insterts in the GPU support arm, For what?? Not like those threads are gonna see any torque anyway. plus the gpu support arm isn't compatable with the latest generation full coverage cards anyway unless you use waterblocks then hopefull the right part of the circuit board is exposed for it to function.Wish I would've waited for newegg reviews to come out before I bought this case. Feel like I just got ripped off by Lian Li

quality control lacking
09/17/2009

Pros: Ordered two cards and received a ver. 1 and a ver. 5.3.?? (Rotate your stalk newegg!!) They both function but one is performing poorly. Read the post below by "count" about the "inconsistent quality"

Cons: Ver.1 requires a 6 and 8 pin and the 5.3 requires two 6 pin connectors. I benched each card seperately in the primary pcie slot with latest CCC 9.8 drivers. I used the crysis benchmark. The 5.3 version performed 26.94% slower than the ver. 1 card. I wouldn't have discovered this problem if I wasn't able to do a side by side comparison. The slower version works decent but 27% slower is unacceptable. XFX need's to do better testing before putting their product's on the shelf. I feel sorry for the others that unknowingly have a poor performer.The quality of construction between the two is very noticeable. ver.5.3 seems much more cheaply constructed than earlier versions. It has much lower value IMO. The difference in weight between the two is very noticeable. Less weight = less material.. It's a way of cutting material cost's I guess. Ver.1 weight is 1 Lbs 12.8 oz. Ver. 5.3 is 1 Lbs 6.4 oz. That's close enough to a half pound difference and It definately feel's like it.

Other Thoughts: At this point I'm going to retun both of these cards and go with the OC version just because It seem's they haven't made drastic changes to the design. If I run into consistency issues with the new these I will have to go with another manufacturer.